In the stolen East Anglia emails, there is a conversation between scientists about and her paper, which argues that the current global warming trend is not unique and that an even more dramatic episode occurred centuries.

The conversation contained in the email is being made to appear like it was an attempt by climate scientists to “muzzle” the Baliunas research paper. Congressman James Sensenbrenner (R-WI), claimed last week that the exchange between academics amounts to a case of “scientific fascism.”

Sensenbrennner and others neglect to mention that the scientists who wanted to “get rid of the offending editor,” were not trying to muzzle anything other than a piece of poor research underwritten by the American Petroleum Institute–an oil lobbying group that spends more than $3 Million per year representing the interests of the fossil fuel industry.

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Unless Sensenbrenner is trained in climate science (and he is not), it is clear from his comments that he has no idea what he is talking about. His comments demonstrate either scientific illiteracy on his part or his political motivatations. Probably both. Scientists who are trained in the field and know the field in which they are commenting have every right to dismiss the findings of others they find flawed. The science will stand or fall on its merits. Sensenbrenner knows nothing of the merits and is unqualified to comment on it as he did.

Science is a Meritocracy, not a democracy. Scientists have every right, even a duty, to make judgements on research.

The editor who let through the Balinas paper could not have had it peer reviewed by 3 referees who knew the subject. Because 12 of her 13 references denied saying in their papers what she said they said. A common source of referees is the cited works. But any reviewer would compare her claims with what the authors actually said, and ask for corrections or recommend the paper not be published.

But the paper did get published, and the chief editor planned to run an editorial refuting the paper. The publisher, a commercial outfit rather than a scientific society, refused to let the editorial run. So the scientists advised each other that the publication was unreliable.

I saw an event where an innocuous but whacky paper got published in a journal of a scientific society. There was a BIGFLAP because the paper slipped through the cracks in the journals review process. Procedures were tightened, at the insistence of society officers, including threats regarding the trustworthiness of the journal.

To use an analogy, I heard of a case where a doctor refused to follow protocol, risking the life of an infant in jeopardy. Other doctors intervened, the infant survived, and the hospital termination priviledges of the bad doctor. Mean old fascist hospital!

The smearing of scientists working to preserve the standards of professional journals threatens the integrity of science as a whole.

You cant even get the authorship correct. The paper’s primary author is Willie Soon and NOT Baliunas. Baliunas is the secondary author. Therefore it is protocol to refer to the paper as Soon and Baliunas.

Let’s hope the research in your crappy book is better than that for this thread.

1) Soon/Balunias arbitrarily characterize periods of dryness and wetness as “warm anomalies” during the MWP. There is no justification for these assumptions anywhere in their paper.

2) They arbitrarily characterize periods of dryness and wetness as *cool anomalies* during the LIA. There’s no justification for this anywhere in their paper (and no attempt to address the obvious contradiction with (1) above).

3) During the 500-year-long MWP, they tally up short-duration “warm anomalies” without demonstrating any “synchronicity” amongst the anomalies. If the planet were truly unusually warm, that these “warm anomalies” would tend to occur simultaneously. Otherwise, they would simply represent heat energy “sloshing around” the planet rather than a planet-wide *increase* in heat energy. Note that most of the “warm anomalies” identified by Soon/Baliunas were limited temporally *and* geographically. Tallying them up without determining that they were in any way synchronous/simultaneous will tell you *nothing* about the temperature of the planet as a whole.

4) They compare “warm anomalies” during the 500-year-long MWP with “warm anomalies” during the single century that comprises the 20-th century without taking into account the 5-fold difference in the length of the time periods. It’s like saying that because you can identify hotter (short term) intervals during a 500-year time period than during a 100-year time period, the average temperature of the 500-year time period must exceed that of the 100-year time-period. The problem with this logic should be obvious.

5) Only during the last 2 decades or so of the 20th century have temperatures exceeded natural variability by a statistically significant amount. But Soon/Baliunas look at climate events of minimum duration of 50 years. A 50-year period length will “average away” the much of the warmth observed during the last two decades of the 20th century. The IPCC itself did not claim an identifiable human signal in the climate until 1995. The Soon/Baliunas methodology effectively dilutes the warmest final decades of the 20th-century with several, much cooler, previous decades.

Your number 5 is a glib statement that has no scientific backup. Where is the statistical evidence that the current warming is a statistically significant increase over natural temperature variation. It is not statistically different. Your statement is basically a lie.

Is that the Hockey Stick that the IPCC won’t use in their reports any more? Is that the hockey stick where they hid the decline in the proxies at the end of the series because it did not cooperate with the instrumental record? Is that the hockey stick that can have a divergence problem at the end of the time series but nowhere else in that time series? Is that the hockey stick that still uses stripbark bristlecone data against the advice of the NAS and Wegman reports? Is that the hockey stick that continues to use inverted paleo temperature data. And finally is that the hockey stick that uses instrumental data latched onto the end (minus the decline) of the proxy data to give us that wonderful hockey stick blade?

You seem to cling to one dead and gone paleoclimatic study that tried to single handedly kill the MWP instead of consider the literally hundreds of studies that show that the MWP was warmer than now. You would rather believe in a consensus of one than in a far more overwhelming consensus.

Sorry sport but the figure you quote is not Mann’s Hockey Stick graph. So get your facts straight. The MBH graph which was figured prominently in the TAR report was removed from the AR4 report and is relegated to a single line graph in amongst a series of other paleoclimate studies. The chapter you should be looking at is Chapter 6 on Paleoclimate.

As for the MWP being localised to Europe, that is rubbish. There are dozens and dozens of peer-reviewed papers that show it to be a global event including papers from South Africa and New Zealand.

You really need to stop believing in your own BS and do some objective reading.

The Bertrand et al (2002) paper models Northern Hemisphere
temperatures and is consistent with the hockey stick you criticised earlier - a small upward trend during MWP, less than 20th century warming.

Booth et al (2006) shows an MWP comparable to 20th century temps.
But the 20th century is warmer, from figure 6.

Buntgen et al (2005) shows an MWP. But the 20th century is warmer;
current temperatures are the warmest in 1000 years.

Castellano (2005) shows a period of highly variable volcanic
activity over 1100-1500AD. The authors suggest that it may represent
a Southern Hemisphere warming - which is not synchronous with Northern
Hemisphere warming.

Cook (1992) shows a weak ‘MWP’ in the 12th century. But the period
1965-1989 was the warmest in the record. The instrumental record shows
warming since 1989.

The volume of ‘Climatic Change’ (26, 1994) the Davis study appears
in has a good review by Hughes and Diaz (pp.109-142):

> In this review a number of lines of evidence are considered,
> (including climate sensitive tree rings, documentary sources, and
> montane glaciers) in order to evaluate whether it is reasonable to
> conclude that climate in medieval times was, indeed, warmer than the
> climate of more recent times. Our review indicates that
> for some areas of the globe (for example, Scandinavia,
> China, the Sierra Nevada in California, the Canadian Rockies
> and Tasmania), temperatures, particularly in summer, appear
> to have been higher during some parts of this period than
> those that were to prevail until the most recent decades of
> the twentieth century. These warmer regional episodes were not
> strongly synchronous. Evidence from other regions (for example,
> the Southeast United States, southern Europe along the
> Mediterranean, and parts of South America) indicates that the
> climate during that time was little different to that of
> later times, or that warming, if it occurred, was recorded at a
> later time than has been assumed. Taken together, the
> available evidence does not support a global Medieval Warm
> Period, although more support for such a phenomenon could
> be drawn from high-elevation records than from low-elevation records.

Hassan (1981) shows an apparent anti-correlation:
> Analysis of Nile flood stages from A.D. 640 to 1921
> reveals major episodes of low Nile discharge during the
> years 930 to 1070 and 1180 to 1350 and major episodes of
> high Nile floods during 1070 to 1180 and 1350 to 1470.
…
> There is also apparently a correlation between low Nile
> discharge and cold climate in Europe.

Holmgren (2001, 2003): temperature series based on stalagmites from
the Makapansgat Valley, South Africa - medieval warming, not as intense
as that described by Tyson (2000).

* Tyson (2000):
> The climate of the interior of South Africa was around 1°C
> cooler in the Little Ice Age and may have been over 3 C
> higher than at present during the extremes of the medieval
> warm period. It was variable throughout the millennium, but
> considerably more so during the warming of the eleventh to
> thirteenth centuries…
> At that time, the positive temperature anomaly in
> annual daily maximum temperature about the 1961-1990 mean
> may have been as much as 3-4C.

In science, you don’t KNOW anything. Even the IPCC gave a percent they may be wrong, 10%. Hence the don’t “Known”. What they have is a probability of being correct. “Knowing” is only found in religions.

It is clear that Wakefield is pushing above his weight, resenting all the time that others are not in his weight class. When he is presented with concrete points about a paper he deemed ‘sensible’ he asks for papers to back these up. And of course if he would be given these he would ask for papers to back up the arguments in the first batch. It is sheer obstructionism.

This term paper mantra that I see in numerous arguments by warmists is basically BS. The paper would not have been published if it had no merit despite the compliant outrage it generated amongst some of the pro-AGW editorial board of the journal.

It is a worthless piece of rubbish only in your mind because it shows Mann to be a complete idiot and statistical amateur because they documented that the MWP was warmer than the current warm period which it was (from multiple sources of evidence from paleoclimatic proxies).

The IPCC reports seem to be some sort of Bible to you. They aren’t. I read them particularly AR4. The IPCC reports are deficient in many ways as certain peer-reviewed literature that is perceived to be in violation with AGW theory (get that. THEORY) are not included. Therefore it is necessary to read beyond the IPCC reports as the gatekeepers of those reports were the now somewhat discredited climategate scientists and ensured that a balanced outlook was not presented.

I’ve seen the “just a theory” meme before. It generally comes from creationists. It definately comes from scientific illiterates. Gravity is “just a theory”, too. Now, jump up and float away, Richard!

And please list for us the peer-reviewed literature that is not included. Just 5 examples from mainstream journals (we can’t count Energy & Environment as a peer-reviewed mainstream journal, it is a social policy journal with a political stance).

gravity is just a theory because it can’t be independently produced or explained.

Newton figured it was a force - something like magnetism

Einstein says nuts to that - it’s a warping of space time around physical objects or something … possibly a particle is involved …we’ll call the particle graviton (because Henry doesn’t seem like such a good name for a particle)

interesting stuff but not entirely satisfying. Is there really such a thing as a graviton? What makes it work …fairy dust I suppose. What’s fairy dust made out of? …I have a theory about that.

Science is the process of being consistenly wrong, until you are proven so. Atomic theory has changed dramatically over the years and will continue to do so as we gain and refine more knowledge. The climate systems is something we currently have very little understanding thereof and any theories and prediciton have to be taken with a grain of salt. The consistently WRONG predictions out of the IPCC climate models exemplify the fact that we certainly do not have full understanding of the climate system.

Arhenniuses greenhouse effect has scientific merit and has stood the test of time. What has absolutely no merit are the pillars of global warming alarmism, The runaway positive feedback loop that the global warming religion subscribes to and the “tipping point” both of which have very little scientific evidence to stand on.

At this point in time and especially in light of the fact that the leaked e-mails reveal corruption of peer review, data manipulation and researchers behaving like political activists not scientists it really is tough to give much scientific credence the AGW alarmis at all. It iwll suck in those with vested political and social interests but for the rest of us their is nothing there.

This is a typical argument of people who have no rational response. Associate the person with a discredited group (even though they do not belong to that group) and then imply that association is real.

Pathetic really.

I have a list of citations further below in this thread. You count how many of them appear in the IPCC reports on Paleoclimate.

Democracy is utterly dependent upon an electorate that is accurately informed. In promoting climate change denial (and often denying their responsibility for doing so) industry has done more than endanger the environment. It has undermined democracy.

There is a vast difference between putting forth a point of view, honestly held, and intentionally sowing the seeds of confusion. Free speech does not include the right to deceive. Deception is not a point of view. And the right to disagree does not include a right to intentionally subvert the public awareness.

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